The Annual Cost Of The World's Great Navies

( Originally Published 1910 )

SIR EDWARD GREY, in a speech on the Naval Estimates in the House of Commons, referred to the above expenditure in the following terms:

" Surely the extent to which this expenditure has grown really becomes a satire, and a reflection on civilisation. Not in our generation, perhaps, but if it goes on at the rate at which it has recently increased, sooner or later I believe it will submerge that civilisation. The burden already has shown itself in national credit—less in our national credit than in the national credit of other nations ; but sooner or later, if it goes on at this rate, it must lead to national bankruptcy. Is it to be wondered that the hopes and aspirations of the best men in the leading countries are devoted to trying to find some means of checking it ? Surely that is a statement of the case in which, however attached a man may be to what I may call the martial spirit, he may at least see that the whole of Europe is in the presence of a great danger. But no country alone can save that."